1. Google is a middleman made of software. It's a very, very large middleman made of software. Think of what Goliath or the Cyclops or Godzilla would look like if they were made of software. That's Google.

2. The middleman acts in the middleman's interest.

3. The broader the span of the middleman's control over the exchanges that take place in a market, the greater the middleman's power and the lesser the power of the suppliers.

For much of the first decade of the Web's existence, we were told that the Web, by efficiently connecting buyer and seller, or provider and user, would destroy middlemen. Middlemen were friction, and the Web was a friction-removing machine.

We were misinformed.

Joshua Porter:

The game is attention. And the attention game is becoming dominated by two players: Twitter and Facebook. That two-pronged sword will eventually be Google’s undoing.

Scott Karp:

The greatest irony of the web content economy is that Google by itself doesn’t have a clue what content is good or bad.